Hasta La Gadget!

Can’t get enough PlayBook in your life? We understand how it is. After all, it’s not every day that you hear of ultraslim 7-inch tablets that promise to take your BBM life to another level. RIM must sympathize with your eagerness as well, since it’s now made its Devcon 2010 keynote available for streaming online — replete with Mike Lazaridis’ impassioned speech about a “no compromise” tablet that’s enterprise-ready, multimedia-friendly, and even comes with “a full gigahertz of RAM” (19 minutes into the video). It’s stirring stuff, and you might even learn a bit more about the QNX-built BlackBerry Tablet OS underpinning the whole thing. The source link is where you’ll find the full 142-minute show.

[Thanks, Moazam]

BlackBerry Devcon 2010 keynote now ready for your streaming pleasure originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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To the untrained eye, you might think you’re looking at a garden variety Bold 9700 here — but you’d be wrong. So wrong! It’s actually running BlackBerry 6, something that no device other than the touchscreen-equipped Torch has managed to do in public (in an official capacity, anyway) so far. We’re not convinced that the multiple home screen navigation bar concept translates very well here — you’ve got to scroll up then left or right to move between bars, which seems like too much trouble when you can just get to your entire list of apps with approximately the same amount of effort. The WebKit browser is unquestionably a huge improvement over what BlackBerry OS 5.0 users are used to, but we still witnessed it bog down significantly when checking out ye olde standby engadget.com, to the point where other UI actions in the OS were impacted. We guess it’s going to take another generation of hardware or two with quicker cores (and more RAM) to fix up that stuff… hopefully. In addition to the 9700, we also checked out the re-upped Pearl 3G, which is exactly what you’d expect in practice: the same user experience, just narrower. A rep told us that the updates are expected to launch within a few weeks, though it’ll depend on your carrier. Follow the break for some quick videos!

Continue reading BlackBerry 6 shows up on Bold 9700, Pearl 3G — and we check it out

BlackBerry 6 shows up on Bold 9700, Pearl 3G — and we check it out originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

Amazon continues to expand its reading and media software to whole new classes of devices, from new tablets to PC web browsers. It’s just not immediately clear just how far the retail giant is going to go.

We’ll take these news items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?

   On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

   On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

See Also:

• Tablet Wars: Amazon Adds Apps to Kindle
• Amazon Shows Off Kindle for iPad
• Scrabble Is First Paid Game App for Kindle
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3
• Independent App Stores Take On Google's Android Market
• Social Networking Meets Apps in New Android App Store
• Your Froyo Tablet Probably Won't Support Android Market

Okay, we’ve got a long way to go before we can do a fair, apples-to-berries comparison between these two titans of industry, but consider this your first sneak preview of the deathmatch to come. As we mentioned in the previous post, the PlayBook is hopelessly locked away in insanely thick Plexiglas — and the iPad is unactivated, though that doesn’t much matter for getting a sense of the size comparison between ’em. Needless to say, the PlayBook looks way easier to lug around… but we just won’t know by how much until we’ve got one resting in our sweaty, eager palms. Hit up the gallery!

iPad vs. PlayBook… fight! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The BlackPad is dead. Long live the PlayBook. As expected, Research in Motion today unveiled a new seven inch tablet built around its BlackBerry OS. The word “BlackPad” was nowhere to be seen at RIM’s annual developer event, however. Nope, the company’s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis unveiled the PlayBook.

The tablet runs a special tablet version of the BlackBerry OS. It features a 1GHz Cortex A9 dual-core CPU, a gig of RAM, document editing, and pairing with BlackBerry devices. There’s are two cameras built-in–front- and rear-facing–for video conferencing.

There’s also 1080p HDMI video on this thing, but, as expected, this is really RIM’s business-minded version of the iPad. The company wants you to do some serious work on the PlayBook. As Lazaridis call it “the first professional tablet.”

There is some truth to the “play” part of the name, however. RIM will be working with developers on the creation of games for the device.

The PlayBook is set for a US release early next year. An international release will follow the second quarter of 2011.